#347 How Walt Disney Built His Greatest Creation: Disneyland

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/1d22a638c2d609c0

There's two things that Charlie Munger said one time that I think almost all of history's greatest entrepreneurs
Understood intuitively.
And that's learning from history is a form of leverage.
And the second thing he said was that there's ideas worth billions in a thirty dollar history book.
If you've been listening to these episodes I've been making about the filmmakers recently, like Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino.
This idea comes up over and over again, both
Tarantino and Spielberg actually studied Walt Disney and learned from him as well. But they would watch and rewatch old movies that they loved, and then decades later, entire scenes from those movies would actually appear
In Steven Spielberg's movies.
They'd appear in Quentin Tarantino's movies.
It's the exact same idea behind st uh young Steve Jobs.
Uh, studying Edwin Land, and then you see Edwin Land's ideas show up in Steve Jobs companies and products. Jeff Bezos was famous for passing out.
Sam Walton's autobiography to the early employees and the top executives at Amazon, and you see that Sam
Walton's ideas would show up in Jeff Bezos' companies and products.
And that is a main theme that reappears
Over and over again for anybody that gets to the top of the profession, whether it's in business and art and sports and music, you see it over and over again. Anyone who becomes great at what they do.
They are steeped.
in the history of their industry.
They talk about it over and over again. They don't just read a book one time. They don't just watch a movie one time. They don't just have one conversation. They do it over.
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This episode
on Walt Disney's greatest creation.
Disneyland.
One day in the early nineteen fifties, Walt Disney stood looking out over two hundred and forty acres of farmland.
in Anaheim, California.
And imagine building a park.
Where people could live among Mickey Mouse and Snow White.
In a world still powered by steam and fire.
For a day.
Or weak.
Or if the visitor was slightly mad.
Forever.
Despite his fame and success, exactly no one wanted to build such a park.
Not his brother Roy, who ran the company's finances.
Not the bankers and not his wife.
Amusement parks at the time were a generally despised business.
Disney was told
That he would only be heading towards financial ruin.
But he persevered.
Initially financing the park against his own life insurance policy.
He assembled a talented team of engineers
Architects.
Artists.
Animators, landscapers, and even a retired admiral to transform his ideas into
Into a wonderland.
The catch.
was that they only had a year and a day.
In which to build it.
On july seventeenth, nineteen fifty five
Disneyland open its gates.
And the first day
Was a disaster.
But the curious masses kept coming.
Yeah.
Hundred million visitors.
Have flocked to the iconic park since then.
In this book
Popular historian Richard Snow
Brilliantly presents.
The entire spectacular story.
A wild ride.
From vision to realization.
That reflects the uniqueness of the man determined to build
The happiest place on earth.
With a watchmaker's precision.
An artist's conviction
And the desperate
High hearted recklessness.
Of a riverboat gambler.
That was from the back cover of the book that I reread and the one I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Disney's Land, Walt Disney and the invention of the amusement park that changed the world.
And it was written by Richard Snow. So originally
Uh, if in case you missed last week.
I just I spent
an insane amount of time reading
eight this eight hundred page biography.
of Walt Disney.
And on that last episode.
I mentioned
that one of my favorite books that I've ever read, and I've done a bunch of uh podcasts and read a bunch of biographies.
On Disney is this book because it's just dedicated to
What D Disney said at the end of his life.
That he was most proud of two things. Keeping control
Of his company?
Because he famously lost control of his first company. So keeping control of his company and then Disneyland.
And the reason I love this book and why I recommend reading it is because I don't know, eighty, ninety percent of it.
is just this relentless resourcefulness that he had to have.
He was not a wealthy man when he built Disneyland. Far from it. Broke.
And so I just think there's a ton of lessons in here. This resourcefulness can be applied to whatever you and I are working on.
And so originally on the episode he did last week
My plan was like hey
Since I already did an episode on this book four years ago.
I'll republish it. And so if you listen to both of them, you can figure out uh the the first episode is how well Disney built himself. And then this one is obviously
how he built his greatest creation.
But then as I pick this up to skim through and to start reading it again, I was like, Oh no, I'm gonna reread it in its entirety because I think I can do a better job than I did four years ago, especially.
Because I just came off.
you know, sixty hours, whatever it was.
of reading that eight hundred page biography of Disney. So I think the great greatest place to start.
And what I really want to focus on.
Is
Exactly what the the back cover did such a great job of is like
Even though he's one of the
Greatest.
uh most celebrated living entrepreneurs.
At the time he has this idea for Disney. And even though it was obvious if you studied his career up until this point that he didn't rest on his laurels, he didn't just want to repeat past successes.
As he said, I love this idea that he kept.
in his hat.
That you can't top pigs with pigs.
He kept that maxim in his hat to remind himself as a way I always have to try to top what I did previously. I should be blazing new trails.
Even though that was you know in a retrospect, if you're uh analysing Walt Disney's career, you know, he's a fifty three year old man when he's building Disneyland.
It should have been obvious that's his approach to his life and work.
The external world, other people.
Even people close to him still doubted him. I think that is a fundamental
lesson of human nature that you and I should internalize. So I think I need to start at the very, very beginning, because it's this great quote.
About the outside perception, what they thought it was going to be and what it turned out to be.
When he reached middle age, it seemed that we were gonna witness an all too familiar process.
The conversion of the tired artist.
into the tired businessman.
When in nineteen fifty five we heard that Disney had opened an amusement park under his own name.
It appeared certain.
That we could not look forward to anything new from Mr Disney.
We were quite wrong.
He had instead
created his masterpiece.
And so I just want to pull a few things out of the first chapter because I think the first chapter gives us great overview.
and really sets the story. And then I'm gonna go into like the prehistory of Dis Disney, where he got the the ideas.
In in many cases, uh Disney reminded me
I think it was Kobe Bryant.
If I'm not mistaken. That said you should treat the world, the the entire world as a classroom that you can take lessons from everything.
And you'll see this in
the this evolution, this multi-year, maybe half decade, maybe decade long evolution of the idea of Disneyland before he actually makes it.
And so the opening chapter is opening day at four AM when his day starts, a few hours before everybody else.
It's the biggest day in his life.
Outside of the birth of his daughters, I would say, maybe the day he married his wife.
But what was fascinating and I I think I need to point this out, it's like
Keep in mind, like everything I'm about to describe to you.
Disney is thirty years.
into his career. He is already Walt Disney.
And yet you've the pressure and the nervousness I don't think ever ends.
He was nervous now, and his anxiety sometimes cracked into anger.
There were so many things that could have been done better. He was fifty three years old, slightly overweight.
An incessant smoker.
But during the past few months he had amazed his colleagues by how quickly he could move about his future park. I need to stop there too.
This ability to move quickly, like physically move quickly, not only push the pace inside your company, right?
But the ability to move quickly and have a lot of energy.
is actually a very common description in these biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs.
And so not only is he about to open for the first time ever an amusement park that's unlike anything else that was on the plane at the time, but he's also doing this like live show.
This show that he doesn't partnership with uh with
A B C
The opening of Disneyland is watched by I think fifty-four percent of the entire American population at the time. So it says not only was Disney inaugurating an amusement park.
He also had to be the host of the largest live TV show ever mounted.
And it's gonna go into this in a minute, but it's amazing that before ABC, so A B C was Disney's main sponsor.
Uh he he says, Oh, you want my T you want a TV show? That's good. You have to
I'll make you a deal.
I'll give you t television programming if you help pay for my park. He had offered that deal because of this time in history, CBS and NBC.
We're well a lot.
They were a lot larger.
A B C was like a distant third.
And so CBS and NBC had turned down this deal.
But pointing this out is so important because it couldn't be more contrarian. What Walt Disney was doing could not have been more contrarian.
So CBS and NBC wanted a Disney television show too, but not enough to get involved.
In the amusement park industry.
Which in nineteen fifty five had become widely perceived
As both dangerous and disreputable.
And so this question that everybody's asking him, his brother's asking him, it says right here his wife's like, Why are you building an amusement park?
Everybody inside and outside his company's gonna ask him this question.
There's actually a fun uh a phenomenal he has got a phenomenal response. And then the lesson behind
If you read between the lines of what he's saying, is a phenomenal lesson to keep in mind and to learn too. I'll get there in a uh uh later on.
But right before the park opens, a journalist is asking like why are you doing this?
And the way I would describe Walt Disney's view on Disneyland and what he was doing. I heard of this interview from Elon Musk a few years ago. That was fascinating. It's you know, they were trying to do the same thing. Journalists was interviewing him.
trying to get behind like why are you doing Tesla? Why are you doing SpaceX? Why are you doing all this stuff? And he says
This is what Elon said that I think could be applied to Dizzy's mindset as well.
Elon Musk said, I think life must be more than just solving problems.
You wanna do projects that are inspiring, projects that make people excited.
And that's what Disneyland has done.
For eight hundred million people, but before the eight hundred million people
Visited.
This idea that came from Walt Disney's mind, it excited him first.
That is so important.
And you see this level of commitment. He had hawked his life insurance
Sold his summer home.
And borrowed every dollar he could to build Disneyland.
Not surprisingly, this had been a tough concept to sell. The park
had struck most other people
As a foolish extravagance.
And an expensive one.
Uh with initial projected cost of a million and a half dollars. So Walt Disney.
Uh, I don't even know if he could do math. Because every single time he's like, Oh, I think this movie will be, you know, fifty thousand dollars or this
thing will be a million dollars. No no. He thought he could build Disneyland for a million and a half dollars.
The final cost was seventeen million. That's about a hundred and sixty million in today's dollars.
So
Uh at the end of this it says he was broke.
But he had built Disneyland.
And the good news is, and he certainly doesn't know this on opening day, but he's not gonna stay
Broke.
For very long. Not only did he create a phenomenal product, one that is constantly he says uh he has a line where it says improvement is my m mantra.
one that he's constantly like it's a living, breathing thing, he's constantly improving. But
I I was sitting here thinking about this idea where he's like okay, I can't figure out how to make
uh no one wants to give me the money to to build these things in and he had this brilliant idea. He's like okay, television networks want
me to create, you know, Disneyland programming.
And the brilliant idea to tie in I will give you what I w what you want if you give me what I want.
Which is obviously funding for my amusement park.
But
So he that's the financing.
of the park, which is brilliant. But this may be the greatest product launch of all time.
Because before opening day, right?
He had run eight months of his television program. He he produced a bunch of other
uh programming for A B C as well. But one of them
Uh let me just read this to you and then then I'll explain why I think it I this this may be the greatest product launch of all time. So
He had run eight months of his television program. He had named his new show Walt Disney Presents or The Wonderful World of Walt Disney, which he could have.
It was simply called Disneyland.
And every weekly episode.
was an advertisement
For the still unborn
Park.
I went on YouTube. You can go on in fact
It was funny, there's entire chapters on this book.
Which is essentially just a a summary of what these shows were about. And so I was like, Well, I can read about them, but I also want to watch them. So
I went and actually watched. I watched the opening day one, I watched the the ones that he was doing, a bunch of the ones that he was doing.
Uh essentially just like watering the g the ground, right?
And
The reason I say it's the maybe the greatest product lunch of all time because it's eight months of one of the highest rated television shows.
That functions when you watch them as a giant ad for Disneyland, but is it is
Just like David Ogie t told us. It's like you can't save souls in an empty church.
Your advertising, your marketing has to first entertain.
It has to hold people's attention.
And so of course Disney's not up there like saying, Hey, come to my park, you know, it's open on this day. This is what it costs.
He's talking about why he's building it.
What it's gonna have.
What it means.
What you can expect to experience.
And the result was that on opening day
It cre the opening of Disneyland creates
the largest traffic jam in Orange County, California history.
And from that opening day and almost every day since in the last seventy years, people have constantly flocked.
to this creation.
And it was his creation. This is one of the most inspiring things about
Obviously, reading biographies, studying Walt Disney, studying Disneyland. In particular, there's a great line in the book where it says Disneyland is the extension of the powerful personality of one man.
One thing that's obvious when you read this book and when you go into detail about how Disneyland was actually created, it's like, Oh, the creation of Disneyland is remember it's very Steve Jobs esque, very Edwin Landesque. So I kept bringing them up on the past episode of Walt Disney. It's like, Oh, the creation of Disneyland was just Walt Disney's personal taste and physical form.
And to me it demonstrates how important it is to for
Even supremely talented p people, you know, it doesn't matter what list you have of history screened entrepreneurs, Walt Disney has to be on that list.
And yet even a supremely talented person like that, if they're not excited, if they're not focused, if they're not alive with what they're working on, that talent could go to waste. And so I wanna go into the prehistory of Disneyland. And his daughter writes this biography, actually wrote
I actually ordered a bunch, two or three other books now.
Maybe four books that I found in the bibliography of of this book and uh last week's book.
But his daughter is describing
what's taking place in her her dad's life right before he goes into this. Because the idea for
Disneyland may come to life for
other people to experience in you know, nineteen fifty five.
But you can trace it back to the nineteen forty five, nineteen forty eight, nineteen forty nine.
He is flat out depressed.
And so his daughter wrote at that time.
I think it was just after the war when nothing seemed to stimulate him.
I could just sort of sense it. I could tell he wasn't pleased with anything that he was doing.
And at this time, he's completely disengaged from the business that made him well known, the one that he innovated in over and over again, it's Disney Studios.
And he's spending all of his time doing something that seems silly, which is building toy trains.
And this is just a hell of a sentence.
One small enterprise did please him.
And it had little to do with the art.
That he had done so much to invent.
And of which he was the undisputed master. So there is a film critic, a New York Times film critic critic.
That comes and visits.
Walt Disney.
in the early nineteen fifties.
And he comes away from this meeting depressed.
Because he loved Disney films.
And so the description of this visit is as follows. He was dismayed to find that the man whose work he had long admired seemed totally uninterested in movies and seemed wholly, almost weirdly concerned.
With the building
of a miniature railroad engine and a string of cars.
All of Disney's zest for innovation, for creative fantasies.
seem to be going into this plaything.
And so at this point, this idea for a physical project and he goes through a lot of different
uh versions of this.
It's just in his mind. He's going to go and travel to this railroad fair.
And his after this experience is the first time he puts his ideas actually on paper and he writes this memo called The Mickey Mouse Park, which I'll get there.
So you can really think of this railroad fair that he attends as an early blueprint for Disneyland.
And so surrounding the railroad fair are all these
External exhibits.
I gotta read this to you because it sounds a lot like Disneyland and they have a great punchline here.
So it says
One can see some of the spores that would blow into Disneyland in the guidebooks description.
Each exhibit will prove an exciting and entirely different chapter in a stirring melodrama. Remember, this is the guidebook.
And the railroad takes you through all these different worlds, or w what Disney would later call scenes, because he thought of
really thought of Disneyland as like a an external, like a three dimensional movie set.
And so at this park that Disney's at
It takes you into through a primitive Indian country.
It takes you to the playgrounds of Florida.
It takes you to the romantic old French quarter of the New Orleans.
And this is the most important part of this entire section. The exhibits added up to a coherent
Hm.
The growth of America told in three dimensions. It was a history lesson that you could walk through.
Although the term still lay in the future.
Walt Disney was visiting a theme park.
And one of Walt Disney's heroes was Henry Ford. So on the way back from this railroad fair, he also visits
You can still go to this thing today. And in fact, I watched a bunch of videos on this
On YouTube. So Henry Ford at the at this point's the richest American.
And he was building this thing called Greenville
C Greenfield Village.
And the way Henry Ford built his park is he didn't build things from scratch. He literally bought old these old structures. So like
He went and bought
Thomas Edison's Menlo Park Laboratory. And what I mean by that, he's like literally told them to disassemble it, put on a trucks.
Bring it to
uh Michigan and reassemble it.
Ford had this incredible collection. Like he had
The cabin where George Washington Carver was born. He had Harve Firestone's childhood farm.
Henry Ford was a big Abraham Lincoln fan. He bought and moved the courthouse where
Uh, when Abraham Lincoln was young, he practiced law.
Henry Ford bought the Wright Brothers' house and the bicycle shop.
Where they conducted their first experiments.
Fords Town. This is so important.
to understand Disney's approach to his entire life, really, but also for in particular D to Disney.
Ford's town was an entirely personal reflection of the man.
So would Disney's be the roadmap of Walt Disney's life. And so it is when he gets back from this trip that he does that first project memo that he calls at the time Mickey Mouse Park.
And it's fascinating because he just lays out a bunch of things that he holds true. Like they're only gonna use the best materials, they're gonna focus on detail.
And there's just a surprising number of the ideas in this
This memo,'cause this is, you know.
a decade and a half or half a decade before Disneyland is actually real.
And what is fascinating is his first idea is not
Okay, let me go out and buy land. I'm gonna build my own park.
His first idea is I want to build a scale down train.
and a railway system that Ag can actually use. So he actually you can it's both that
People can get on it.
And I don't want to just be directing the design from on high. He the this is the crazy thing.
Disney actually pays one of his employees.
Two
To teach him he tr
Heal.
He learns and trains to be Walt Disney in in his fifties, right?
Is learning and training to be a machinist.
And so now he shows up at the shop, it says they cleared off a workbench.
And the next day.
began conducting a master class in machining for a single pupil.
And so the train they're building is called number one seventy three. There's a great line.
in the the biography.
That I read last week on
Uh, Walt Disney where it's like his main traits were the combination of raw ingenuity and a sadistic determination. This
When I read this the the
The one
When I read this paragraph
The the the term sadistic determination.
Sadistic determination and sadistic dedication.
This is what this looks like.
So it says number one seventy three was not destined to be a mere ornament.
It was to power a railway system and Disney needed a place to run it.
He drove his wife out to see a five acre undeveloped hilltop.
It seemed time for a new larger house, he told them.
But what chiefly drew him to it
was the varied terrain.
The terrain and very fine views.
That would be finer still when seen from a moving train.
He is explicit about why he's buying this property, right? His wife and daughter saying, Oh, it's time for a new family house.
He says I want the line to run completely around the house.
That's why I bought five acres of land. So I have plenty of room to run.
And so now they are designing where the track is actually going to run. This is really important because
Yeah.
D
Disney had this
This crazy drive. He had to be the best. Remember he says he wants to conquer wor worlds.
He wanted absolute domination. He wanted to pick a field in which he could not be one of the best.
He wanted to be the very best.
And w to him w the the definition of
uh being the best is like there is no additional room for improvement.
And so he is always going to optimize. He said the only moat that he believed in was the superior quality of his product, right?
He's like, I'm optimizing for quality and excellence above every other consideration. I am not optimizing for cost. And you see this over and over again when he gets
Super mad.
Like we'll start yelling at people when employees are like, Well, I found a
You know.
We can do it the way you do it, which is better, or we could do it this way that's like slightly less better, but a lot cheaper.
And so they're building this tunnel. He actually builds a tunnel.
Where you're like you go you're on
And usually he's the one driving the train, by the way.
You're on the train, you know, a bunch of other people, he'd have a bunch of parties at his house and they would just go riding the train for hours and he's on the front one.
And he would go through a tunnel.
And so
They're like, hey, uh you know, these curves are really expensive.
Tunnels are really expensive.
Isn't it it's much more prudent, Walt.
That let's just make
the tunnel straight because, you know, that's a lot cheaper. And Disney's response is hell, it's cheaper to not do it at all.
I don't want you to tell me any of the cost for the tunnel.
And you might be like, David, why are you spending so much time talking about this train? Because this is not about a train.
He is that's not what he's doing.
I love this evolution of an idea. I mean, how valuable is Disneyland and theme parks to the Disney Empire today?
Yeah, but you're talking this is this is the germination of a
multi, multi billion dollar idea.
And it started out with just a train.
And what's fascinating is like there winds up being Saxon.
It falls over
somebody gets burned, but that's not why he stopped.
Doing it. There's a there's a great line. I just need to read this to you.
And they're like, you know, this guy spent years doing these experiments, fifty thousand dollars uh in nineteen fifty dollars.
uh building his train, buying his house, like doing all this crazy stuff.
And they said
How strange that the boss would just drop it.
Walt doesn't give up.
So he must
Have something else.
in mind.
And so the note I left myself here and I'm looking at Founders Notes. If you have a subscription to Founders Notes already.
after l listening to this episode, I would go and actually read my highlights from this book'cause there's all this commentary.
That I put on top of the highlights.
It's a great way to reinforce what's actually taking place here, but really
Like think about that. Walt doesn't give up. I'm reading from from my notes now.
Walt doesn't give up.
So you must have something else in mind, and I said I can't think of a better trait to have than sadistic determination.
He's not going to give up and he doesn't let any experience go to waste. So what did he learn from doing this? Well, Walt Disney had learned a great deal from building his train.
He learned about creating a full operating system.
so carefully landscaped that it gave his guests an experience.
A narrative.
Of shifting scenes, a narrative that's so important. A narrative of shifting scenes, one blending smoothly into the next.
Here was a whole little world with him in absolute control and one in which visitors weren't sitting back and watching a screen.
But rather were full participants. He used this railroad as an example of what he wanted to do next. There is a definitive line.
Between Walt's train at his home and what he went on to do with Disneyland.
And so there's a couple of fascinating things here. The fact is that there was small theme parks, small amusement parks.
You know sixty years
before Disneyland. And we're gonna get get into the actual incentives, the economic incentives, why they were
You know, rather crappy.
Uh it said something like
Economics worked against such extravagance.
But I do want to bring out the the main point of what I'm trying to get to.
it it's fascinating. It's like okay, this you know, the germination of this like very basic uh version of what Walt's gonna do. That idea's been around for a long time.
But they're all suck.
He he's touring all these places and you just cannot get over how bad they are.
And the main theme that the
The idea behind what he's discovering is like oh
Their mediocrity is my opportunity.
It is an opportunity specifically because
There is so much room for improvement.
And so he's touring all these amusement parks and there's just a hilarious one.
'Cause he goes to Coney Island.
And he goes with his wife.
And
He tells her.
I'm almost ready to give up the idea of an amusement park after seeing Cone Island. The whole place is so run down and ugly. This is Walt Disney speaking. Direct quote from him.
The people who run it are so unpleasant. The whole thing is almost enough to destroy your faith in human nature.
So in the early nineteen hundreds, there was little miniature versions of Disneyland just done
on a much smaller and like worse scale. And they hold a lot of the same traits that Disney's gonna use. They all had single entrances. They charge admission fees just to get on the grounds.
And they offered increasingly elaborate attractions in a carefully monitored environment.
And this blew my mind.
This is an absolute wild reason that there were so many small amusement parks.
So there's over twenty thousand
They came lesser lesser imitators of what Disney is gonna be.
There's over twenty thousand of these in America alone.
In fact, there was one just fiftin blocks.
Away from Walt Disney's childhood home. It's called Electric Park, and the reason.

Small amusement parks were built in the early nineteen hundreds, remember?
This is gonna blow your mind.
This is pre invention of the electric meter.
Okay, so electric companies.
This is before they switch to usage based pricing. You're like, what the hell are you talking about, David? What does that have to do with anything?
Why was it called Electric Park? It was called Electric Park.
Because it was a child of the trolley car, which is a electric, right?
The new traction companies all face the same problem. Ridership dropped away to next to nothing on the weekends because people were just riding electric trolleys to commute to work, right?
So during the weekends no one's working.
their ridership drops. That's a big problem because they have to pay power companies for electricity every day, no matter how few fares they collection collected to offset its cost.
the invention of the electric meter of usage based pricing is in the future.
So if you're them, you have a business, right? You have seven days of expenses and only five days of usage, five days of revenue, seven days of cost.
Five days of revenue. That's a problem.
And so these amusement parks
Were w originally built by trolley companies.
To give people a reason to travel on Saturday and Sunday, they built amusement parks.
And they weren't called amusement parks back then. They were called trolley parks, but they were what we would consider them amusement parks.
And so this following quote by Walt Disney is really when I realized, oh, the opportunity is there because there's so much room for improvement that
You can I mean th this goes back to what we learned about Steve Jobs, one of my favorite things. And took me like I was in book like number ten before it.
Somebody smack me in the face with this.
Was that
One of Steve Jobs' greatest talent was identifying markets full of second rate products.
That's exactly what Walt Disney's doing.
He identified a market full of second rate products. There's nobody in the world.
That could build an amusement park like Walt Disney could based on his experience, the characters that he's created, the stories that he's created. And so he identified their mediocrity is my opportunity.
Why would you want to get involved in an amusement park? They're so dirty and not fun.
Why would you want to get involved in a business like that, they asked him?
And he fielded the question the way he would countless times during during Disneyland's germination.
That's exactly the point.
Mine isn't going to be that way, he said. Mine's going to be a place that's clean.
Where the whole family can do things together.
And so in nineteen fifty two, his original ideas like I'm gonna build Disneyland, I'm gonna build it by the studio, it's gonna be in Burbank.
The interesting thing is the city would not let him build it.
But this is how he described this is how Waltesy described Disneyland a few years before it was built.
He said Disneyland will be something of a fair, an exhibition, a playground, a community center, a museum of living facts, and a show place of beauty and magic.
And it is in the early planning stages that he runs into a problem that he's going to experience the whole time. No one has experience.
For something that's never been done before.
And it is during this futile search for an architect, because you can't find somebody that's ever built it because nothing like this has ever been built to for.
That he actually stumbles upon one of the greatest ideas.
That it is less architecture and more storytelling.
And film making.
Disney had come to believe that what he needed couldn't be supplied by architects. A friend of his told him, No one can design Disneyland for you. You have to do it yourself. What Walt Disney was seeking had more to do with movies than with architecture. Disney's buildings would not be the work of architects. They would be the work of set designers.
His studio people would have to do it.
And so if one of the first problems that Walt Disney needs to solve
He gotta figure out where now that Burbank won't let him put the park over there.
Where's this thing gonna be? So he hires
the Stanford Research Institute, and they're gonna help them find and then plan and then build the park as well. Now this is hilarious.
The two dudes
from the Stanford Research Institute, the ones that are gonna help him build a park.
They're named Woody and Buzz.
Hilarious that forty five years later, the first movie that Disney and Pixar
Make together toy story. The main characters are Woody and Buzz, and me and my my four year old son, we've uh my daughter did this too, but we've watched
I've lost track out Toy Story is one of my favorite, you know, kids' movies ever, but I've watched all four of them.
And I can't I've lost track how much.
This jumped out to me'cause I'm just I've had torsed around the brain the last decade.
So anyways.
Now
They he's going through. What's fascinating to me.
Is
Disney is a superb storyteller, master storyteller. Everybody that runs into him from the time he's like an 18 year old kid until he's in his 60s says the same thing about him.
And so he has to tell the story.
to Woody and Buzz and he's describing
what he wants to build and
What's shocking, it's very similar. He uses this he does this on the television show as well.
And right now he's
Telling the story.
to recruit and empower the people that are gonna help build him build the park, right? But then he tells the story
to get people excited to actually come to for for not just employees and builders and planners, but actually customers and guests are his as he calls them.
And so this is this description where it's just very odd because it's unlike any other amusement park.
in existence at this point.
It sounded strange, unlike anything you would expect in an amusement park.
At a time when most parks were planned as a grid with four side and access entrances,
So he would go and and
Uh part of his planning would he go and talk to other amusement park owners.
And then like your single entrance idea is the stupidest thing ever.
Uh people don't like to walk.
You need to have f uh multiple e
Entrances close to parking lots.
And so again.
Going back to that note I referenced earlier, the creation of Disneyland was Walt Disney's personal taste and physical form. That's the way I think about it.
So it says.
Uh most of them
had these, you know, four side access. Disney outlined a design concept.
Of a single park, a single entrance into the park, rather.
Once the guests entered, they'd pass through a turn of the century main street.
Which would end in a circular plaza or town square. The area would then feed off.
Into four thematic
Activity areas, the world of tomorrow, fantasy land, frontier land, and adventure land.
More things he did different than his competitors. Most amus amusement parks wanted all the street visibility they could get.
Walt's entire park would be hidden from the outside world.
By landscaping.
Walt was talking about customized rides, exhibits, and attractions instead of the standard off the shelf
Ferris wheel and tunnel of love.
Rides would be subordinate to story.
But most alarming of all
This entertainment anomaly
had to be open in just two years.
And so a problem they ran into right away is like they looked at a few other locations. As soon as word got out that Disney might be buying, building his amusement park there, all these other realtors and and real estate investors would go out and buy up the property.
So he's like, Okay, how do we solve this problem? They actually do it really smart. They they use a bit of misdirection here.
And so not only does he use people secretly working for him to slowly buy up all the property, but then they actually launch a very effective disinformation campaign. They leak to the local papers that Disney is planning an amusement park in the San Fernando Value Valley.
Fifty miles away.
And that misdirection causes people to go try to figure out where he's building in the San Fernando Valley, even though he's not, and buy a property around it.
And so once Disney has his land, he actually drives
You remember these are just orange groves, right?
And he drives his friend out there to tell him the story of like what he's gonna build. This guy named Art Linkletter, who's uh one of the most famous TV hosts.
in the country.
And I just think his response is hilarious.
And so it says Disney pulled the car over.
We got out and Walt began vividly describing Disneyland. The acres of colorful buildings and places
Uh and all the names of the places like Tomorrowland, Fantasyland, and all that. The thousands of people and what they would be doing. And while he talked, he became more and more enthusiastic by the minute.
I began to grow more and more concerned. I hardly knew how to tell'em.
That for once he was making what would probably be the biggest and most ruinous mistake of his life.
What could I say I knew he was wrong?
And so up until this point, he's been financing everything himself.
This is where we're going to be able to do
He winds up.
selling his vacation home in Palm Springs.
He borrows against his life insurance.
His wife is like in tears. She's very worried, like what if he dies? What's gonna happen to her?
And so Walt knows that he has to get his brother and his partner, Roy.
Hrother Roy Disney involved.
And up until this point, you know, it's just been Walt's little side project, you know, he's clearly been depressed with the studio, so he's just working on this to
To be a distraction.
And then Roy realizes oh this isn't going away.
I I I have to get involved. I have to like save my little brother. And
They have this h th you know, this interesting relationship, these ups and downs like any brothers can have, especially brothers that work together so closely. There was a time where they were fighting over business, they didn't speak to each other for two years, which is wild.
And so
Roy, uh Walt's always saying, you know, Roy's trying to hold me back.
And really Roy's saving his ass financially,'cause by Walt Disney's own admission, like he was
Terrible with m money, terrible with
He just never paid attention to that.
Uh at all.
And I'm gonna get into what the the role that Roy was playing.
And why, you know, there would be no Walt Disney if it wasn't for Roy Disney as well.
But I just thought it was funny, where um
You know Walt's talking about this
adversary relationship that his older brother always has with him. He's holding him back.
And it says Ro Roy saw their relationship dis differently.
When Walt and I were uh little, we lived on a farm.
And we had to sleep in the same bed.
Now Walt was just a little guy and he was always wetting the bed.
And he's been peeing on me ever since.
And so
Yeah.
It's just like poor.
Again, I I love the the role that Roy plays, but I just couldn't imagine. In fact, there's this great sentence.
Where
You know, I gotta be clear here, Walt's older brother Roy, was the perfect partner.
for Walt to have.
You know, they had
Everything you wanted. They had different complimentary talents.
And Roy was fine in
in being in Walt's shadow.
You know, I there is
A hundred times the amount of people that knew
Walt Disney.
Than new Roy Disney.
And
There's this great description of their relationship in the book.
And it's talking about Roy's perception of
this unique understanding that no, my brother's supremely talented. He's a one in a ten million kind of talent.
Roy never lost his calm understanding that the company's prosperity rested not on the rock of conventional business practices.
But on the churning.
Extravagant.
perfectionist imagination of his younger brother.
That is an incredible
Paragraph but it's also
It's not meant to diminish. Roy was a it was a talent of his own, was a genius of his own. This is how somebody worked it with both of them for a long time.
says Walt was the front man and Roy was in the background.
In a way, Roy was as much of a genius as Walt was.
They shove their chips in the pot.
They go all in multiple times. They went in all in on Snow White. They're going all in on Disneyland.
Roy always save the day. If it hadn't been for my big brother, Walt said.
I'd swear I'd be in in jail several times.
For checks bouncing, I never knew how much money we had in the bank.
And so Roy is now going to want be the one that goes and pitches these
T V studios'cause he's got this idea. Uh Wald has this idea of how he's gonna finance the park, because the the banks are not gonna give you money. It's just not gonna happen.
the Disney Studios not doing well financially.
And what was fascinating is Roy understood that like once Walt was focused on something, there's just nothing you can do.
He said that a determined junior'cause he would call Walt Junior, he says a determined junior was impossible to dissuade.
And so his whole point is like, Well, if it's futile to try to stop my brother, I need to then help my brother.
And so we are now in September of nineteen fifty three. Now keep in mind
Disney opens in July nineteen fifty five.
They have no money. They have no financing so far, right?
They just have a couple hundred acres of orange groves at this point. It is remarkable how fast they did this. So
Really, I want to talk to you about how Walt Disney makes his pitch deck.
And this pitch deck is gonna be unbelievably successful. This pitch deck doesn't work on CBS or NBC, but it works on ABC. Remember what Walt Disney said last week.
He said the ABC needed a tele my television show so damn bad, they bought an amusement park. That made me laugh. I laughed out loud when I read that.
So I'm gonna give you a summary of how he builds his his
Pitch deck, okay?
And it's remarkable how fast he he moves as well.
So he calls up a former employee on a Saturday morning.
He says, Hey, come down to the studio, I wanna tell you about something.
He tells him about Disneyland.
This guy's name is Herb Rhyman. Herb Rhyman's like that sounds fantastic.
And Dizzy's like great.
He asked Herb.
To draw a rendering by Monday.
Roy is leaving for New York.
On Monday. It is Saturday morning.
On Monday so he can take
This drawing that has not been completed yet.
So he can pitch the T V networks.
We talked about last week and we talked about a bunch of times, so then in many cases a lot of the great
leaders and entrepreneurs in history. They they they resemble cult leaders, and so much so that there's like a hundred page chapter in that eighteen hundred page biography called The Cult.
And we see how
Spookily charismatic.
that Walt Disney was because this guy's like, Hell no, there's no way I'm doing it.
Disney offers, he says, Hey, I will stay with you the entire time And so they're eating like
Sounded gross to me. You're eating tuna sa tuna sandwiches and milkshakes the whole weekend, right? But they work forty hours straight.
And the end result is this beautiful aerial drawing of what is what was in Walt Disney's mind. Now read now, listen to this. I'm gonna read this paragraph to you. This blew my mind.
What they had conjured up from Disney's vision and Ryman's patient skill.
Was remarkably close to what two years and many millions of dollars later.
Would rise from the vanished orange groves of Anaheim, California.
To tease the imagination of the entire world.
So this is nineteen fifty three, okay, and television is literally going to save
Disney. Now now what is remarkable is
One of other Dizzy's heroes in in in addition to Henry Ford was this guy named Charlie Chaplin. Charlie Chaplin founded this company called United Artists, right?
And Disney was like, Oh my God, I can't believe I got signed to my hero's company. They were being his distributor at the time. This is back in nineteen thirty six.
They went up having falling out, him and United Artists.
Because
the United Artist was pushing them like hey we want
future rights to broadcast your Disney movies on T V.
Disney broke with that. He's like absolutely not.
And the crazy thing, I said last week it's four thousand there was four thousand TVs in the entire world.
When he made this decision?
No no.
I was wrong.
There's only two thousand TV sets in the entire world where Disney
was so adamant about not relinquishing these rights that he broke with
the company of his hero.
This may be one of the most important lessons for you and I to internalize. Think about this.
This decision, right, this holding to this c absolute control.
And he always was a technologist. Like, yeah, he built a media company, but he always utilized technology and was a a fan of technology. He understood way
This is gonna something that's gonna come up in the story when every game.
Disney understand that this new technology, T V.
It was an ally, not an adversary, and Disney understood this years.
Before
other movie studio moguls did.
There's a line in the book where it says that the other studios regarded television as a homeowner does termites.
And
He's at like a meeting and I think I cover this later on where he's at a meeting and they're like yelling at him, they're calling him a traitor. He's like, You don't understand, this is an ally.
I'm gonna get into that, but
I really need to like I
I wanna spend some time here so you and I don't ever forget this.
Again.
It is he makes his decision nineteen thirty six.
Nineteen fifty three, it's going to give him the funding of the park and then be the greatest
promotional tool.
For his business has ever existed.
And so this idea that I wrote myself, and these are the notes that you can find at Founders' Notes too.
This decision paid dividends twenty years later. Hold on.
Technology developed by other people.
constantly benefited Disney's businesses.
Many there are many such cases in the history of entrepreneurship just like this. Go back to the book.
Disney clear explains this is before he has signed a deal.
Right? This is excellent.
Every time I got to thinking of television, I would think of this park.
And I knew
That if I did the park I would have to have some kind of medium like television.
To let people know about it.
So I said, Well here's the way.
Then I'll get my part going.
It is natural for me to tie it in with my television.
So I just sort of insisted
That my Disneyland Park
Be part of my television show.
The network that signed for a Disney program would have to help pay for the park.
And this is why it's so important that I I really do feel Walt did not really look around, he looked in.
He looked into his personal taste.
He built a business that was authentic to himself.
And the most authentic business
the the the business that was most authentic to itself
which is many such cases in the history of entrepreneurship. This is why I say like the myth of this
You know, young
Entrepreneurial genius.
In almost every case of these stories that you and we've now done what, three hundred and fifty of them together.
the the greatest work that somebody does did not come in the first decade of their career.
It is many, many, many decades into the career.
Disney's
greatest creation came thirty five years.
Thirty-five years into his career. Same thing with Steve Jobs. And it is because he had this ability to be contrarian, not contrarian for contrarian's sake, but because he really believed he was not looking around, he was looking in.
So he goes to this
meeting with a bunch of other these other studio heads and the head of MGM said, You're being a traitor to the motion picture industry. Listen to
This is
clarity of thought here.
That is silly.
If I was able to put a trailer of your next movie picture into every home in the United States.
How much would you give me?
A milyen dollars, at least I rest my case.
They didn't understand the show was a trailer.
But in his case, the show was a trailer for Disneyland. It's also a trailer for every single other thing where he does this um I talked about this last week.
He does his documentary.
about the creation of the movie Twenty Thousand Leagues Under Sea.
it people find it entertaining has to it has to be a a standalone
you know, interesting piece of content on its own.
But if you're able to produce something like that, then what's the result? Are movie sales gonna go up or down?
You get to the end of an hour long documentary.
about how this movie's built, you go watch that documentary.
And so this is the deal they sign with ABC after N B C and CBS said no.
Uh and
A B C would invest a half a million dollars outright in the park.
Then they have to purchase a weekly, hour long television program and for that think about it.
Disney got paid to advertise.
His park. That's the way you think about it.
They're paying him fifty thousand dollars a show during the first year.
Sixty thousand dollars a show in the second
And seventy thousand dollars a show.
In the third year.
The network would also guarantee four point five million dollars in construction loans.
At forty million dollars is the biggest programming package in history.
And so now in addition to building the park, he's gotta build out all this content for TV. They've never done it before.
And this is one of the things I most admired. He just wasn't scared to go into areas where he had no experience. He just trusted if I can assemble a group of talented people, they'll figure it out along the way. This is hilarious.
I love a story.
Bill Walsh remembered that he was going through a period of frequently running into his boss in hallways and parking lots.
When one day
Walt stopped him and said, Hey, you.
You be the producer of my T V show.
Walsh was dumbfounded.
Huh?
I don't have any experience as a television producer.
Who does, Walt said, and that was that.
And we see the approach that he had for animation is the same that he has
For the amusement park. He says, I do not want anyone hired who has anything to do with an amusement park. He optimized for talent. He wanted to train his own people.
He said over and over again
I think he got like he started cursing about it too.
uh where he he he uh people like when he would recruit from other
Uh like animation studios.
He said he had to put up with their goddamn poor working habits from doing cheap pictures.
He believed it was easier to start from scratch with young art students and indoctrinate them into the Disney system, something he did throughout his entire career over every single decade.
is he'd have these these mandatory
Essentially create his own training and curriculum, regardless of what they were working on, and he would make the classes mandatory over and over again. Now, sometimes they could
uh like stop the classes, but any time they were doing something new, like an amusement park, there was mandatory training.
In fact, there's an entire chapter in this book about
the school for like training the actual cast of the employees that are gonna work in the amusement park.
Another thing I love about Walt is when you tell him it's not gonna work.
And he believes in his thinking, he gets excited.
And so they go and meet with a bunch of other amusement park owners, and this is what they say after a presentation on Disneyland.
The reaction was unanimous. Disneyland would not work.
All the proven money makers are conspicuously missing. There's no roller coasters, there's no Ferris wheel.
There's no carney games.
You don't have barkers like the the guys that stand along
the midway to sell sideshows, so
They say without barkers.
uh the marks won't go in. Now think about that.
They didn't call'em customers, they didn't call them guests. They call them marks.
Custom rides will never work. And besides, the public doesn't know the difference or care. Many of Disney's favorite projects made no sense at all.
Things like the castle and the pirate ship are cute, but they aren't ride, so there's no economic reason to build them.
There's too many things here that do not produce revenue.
Walt screwy ideas about cleanness and great great landscape maintenance are economic suicide.
He will lose his shirt.
By overspending on things that customers never really noticed.
Tell your boss to save his money.
Tell him to stick to what he knows and leave amusement business to people who know it.
This did not frighten Walt Disney.
Those guys who call a paying customer a mark.
Couldn't grasp.
What he had in mind.
And again, he trusted his own judgment, he trusted his own his own taste. He's not
Th what he's really trying to build and he he said this over and over again, it's it's much closer to a motion picture than it is amusement park.
And so he realizes, well, there's a good place for me to recruit talent, and that is my studio. This is hilarious, because he set up a separate company.
This is a it's W E D. It's separate from Walt Disney Studios.
And so it's in designing Disneyland, we thought of the park as if it were a three-dimensional film. We wanted everything.
That guest experience.
not only the shows and rides to be an entertaining part of the story. This was a new idea.
We took the most basic needs of guests and turned them into attractions.
Disney can this is hilarious. Disney continued to prowl through the studio.
Tapping people for his park.
Some of them would only be gone for a few weeks or months and in some, as it turned out, for years. The staff members left behind began referring to the new project.
As Cannibal Island. That is hilarious.
They'd eaten into their work for so much.
That now the new project is called Cannibal Island.
One thing I think Walt Disney would agree with, it says in the in the multiple books that he's just not a snob.
He has a like high levels, uh like high standards and he he demands excellence.
But he's very informal.
And so there's just a ton of unique ways that Disney would recruit talent to work.
on Disneyland. And so
One of the biggest things that he didn't know how to build was like he had these giant ships and you had to build your own entire river.
And so he's gonna recruit this admiral, this former admiral.
from the U S Navy, this guy named Joe Fowler, who's gonna work he not only does he help
Build
Disneyland, but he winds up b uh building Disney World as well.
And listen to this exchange. He goes to meet him, he says there was no discussion of any specific job, but as the visitors made their farewells,
Walt said to him, Joe
I'd like you to have come down I'd like you to come down next week.
And have a look at Disneyland. We'll send you a ticket.
The ticket arrived quickly. The next Monday, the Admiral, having packed a single change of clothes, set off for Los Angeles, telling his wife.
I don't know anything about the motion picture business. I'll be back tomorrow night.
Mrs. Fowler would not see her husband again for three weeks.
He arrives to Burbank at the studio office, and Walt talked to him about Disneyland for half an hour.
Then he excused himself. He said he had to go see rushes from the previous day's filming.
I'll be gone for maybe an hour, Walt said.
Disney never returned. After a while a secretary appeared in the doorway.
Are you Joe Fowler?
Yes.
Will you come with me?
This is your office. There's some contractors in the office opposite of you.
That wanna talk to you.
And then he handed him an out envelope. Here's the keys to a car.
That was my introduction, said Fowler.
Nothing was mentioned about salary for a week.
He was to be the construction boss.
For the park.
Which had to be open in a year.
And then another thing I love about the story is there's just a ton of these relentlessly resourceful ways.
That they get this done.
On a smaller budget.
And in record time. So
Disneyland or d well Disney had this landscaping was i incredibly important to
The look of the c the park, the story of the park.
And so he wanted he hired this landscape firm.
And he's like, Okay, I need all these mature tre trees.
Mature the problem with buying mature trees are they're really, really expensive. You're literally buying time and they only have a couple hundred thousand dollar budget and they have to landscape, you know, hundreds of acres.
And so the trees that Walt Disney wants are like five hundred dollars each.
They don't have enough money to buy the amount of trees they need if they're$500 each. This is how they figure out a way to buy them for twenty dollars each.
Bill was friends with the head of landscape architecture for the California Department of Transportation.
And he got advanced notice when a new road was about to be cut down
And there's trees that stood in its path.
The Santa Monica Freeway, the Pomona and the Santa Ana freeways all yielded trees.
For Disneyland, we paid twenty five dollars for each tree to the contractor.
who was just going to bulldoze them and take them to the dump.
That's not all they did.
At night they would drive around prosperous neighborhoods knocking on the doors of houses
Whose yards contained promising specimens.

Upon a magnificent banyan tree.
that a tree that was easily worth several
Towzen dollars.
They rang the doorbell.
And when the owner answered, they asked if they might consider they asked him.
If he might consider parting with his tree, the man laughed.
That big old son of a bitch there.
I'm so tired of that thing.
They got that tree for the cost of installing a small tree in its place.
And so when it came to picking a host for the show that's gonna be on ABC called Disneyland.
It was very obvious that it there's only one possible
person and that was the actual founder. And I think more founders should do this. They're in the best position to tell the customers why.
Why is it
Product exists. Why is it so important to you? In fact.
One of the best description I heard of this is when I many years ago, the first time I read
James Dyson's autobiography Against the Odds. He talked about this.
I think I talked about this in the last time on episode three hundred.
And he says I set off around the world to start selling it properly.
It was time spent away from designing, but it was to teach me above all else.
That this experience, that is. This is what the experience is teaching him.
that above all else that only the man who's brought the thing into the world can presume to foist it on others
and demand a heavy price with all of his heart.
And Walt did not have a public facing TV show before this. And so he's he's talking about his thinking of why he did this.
says I don't consider myself an actor or anything. That's the greatest thing. It's like trying to be authentic, right?
But in trying to get a hold of these things, I can introduce them. I can get them going.
I'm myself, and that's good or bad. I'm still myself.
It's my business and I can talk about it. It's what we do here at the studio. So when anything was a new project, it's exactly what he did internally.
You know, if he had martial resources to try to do something new, like when he wanted to
make the world's first full length animated movie in Snow White. He just marshaled his team together and he told a story. He's like, I'm just gonna be doing that now, except
Instead of just telling my employees, I'm telling the entire world.
And make no mistake, he was nervous and anxious about this. And so, you know
uh Walt Disney had this like very clean cut image and in many cases
He thought it was somewhat of a contradiction'cause you know, he's he he cursed.
He smoked s uh s he chain smoke cigarettes and he drank.
And so what's fascinating is before the show they made this like
potion. They call it a potion that would smooth his throat and lessen his his anxiety.
It was
Eggs beaten in wine.
So he would drink a little bit of eggs m mixed with wine, mixed with alcohol, and it would take the edge off and make him less nervous before he went on the air.
And so this goes back to this idea that the creation of Disneyland was just Walt Disney's personal taste and physical form.
Because Disney did not want any formal organizational chart. He actually says multiple times, I don't ever want to see an organizational chart.
And so we have
one of the guys that worked with them.
was being interviewed.
And he says in the very early months, like the very beginning of Disney. And he says, You ask the question, what was our process like? I kinda laugh because process is an organized way of doing things.
I have to remind you, during the wall
The wall period.
of designing Disneyland, we didn't have processes. We just did the work. Process came later.
All of the things had never been done before.
Walt had gathered up all these people who had never designed a theme park.
They had never designed a Disneyland.
So we were all in the same boat at one time.
And we fe and we had to figure out what to do and how to do it on the fly as we go along with it.
And not even discuss plans, timing, or anything. We just worked.
And Walt just walked around and made suggestions.
And then let's go back to this informal way of recruiting.
Yeah, I really think it it speaks to what James Lyson was just saying. It's like you know, you're the founder of the company, your enthusiasm as a
Is infectious.
If just the way you you recruit and you inspire employees, you can do it.
uh to the outside world. That's why w how he was doing it for internal employees, why he was the host of the T V station, but you also see in how he recruited people. So
He's like, listen, you know, you can dream, create, design, and build the m w the most wonderful place in the world.
But it still takes people to operate it. And so this is where he starts
He's recruiting this guy named Van Arsdale.
Van Arsdale, France, actually.
And he's gonna run this school, this this essentially training school for all the cast members that are gonna work at this at the theme parks.
And it is amazing to me how many people that were
Really important in building Disney.
Uh Disneyland?
were actually they they developed skills during the war, during World War Two that they w
were directly transferable to
the work they'd wind up doing for Walt.
So during the war, Van worked for consolidated aircraft corporation. He was in charge of their training.
And so keep that in mind for about sixty seconds from now. So this is what
Meeting and being recruited by Walt Disney was like.
He shows up at the studio.
He says a dapper looking fellow in a sports shirt.
Entered the office and plop down into the chair.
Without any introduction I knew that
I was sitting next to Walt Disney.
They shook hands.
I'll always remember that handshake.
Somehow I'd imagine that Walt Disney would have the soft, delicate hands of an artist drawing Mickey Mouse.
But my hand met the firm grip of a man who had grown up doing hard farm labor.
And working for his father in construction.
Disney took out a cigarette and he began to speak. This is his recruiting, right?
As I listen to him.
The in and and this enthusiasm conversation, I was struck by the sense of excitement.
That Disney felt for this project enthusiasm is contagious. It is infectious. You can literally transfer.
your enthusiasm for your project to other people.
He even returned he even turned to me an outsider.
То презент із соцій спок форту ар.
And this is Van describing why he feels he was recruited to this job.
I guess they felt if I could convert sixty five thousand cowboys, farmers, and homemakers into dedicated aircraft workers.
Then I could mold a group of diverse
Californians with no business experience and to producers of the Disneyland dream.
People have to be trained to operate this place, and I know you can handle the job.
That began his w his working schedule for the next
Two years of fourteen hours a day, seven days a week.
And one of the smartest thing that Van does is he imbibes their work
With a sense of meaning. This is why they this is what stories do. This is why the storyteller is the most powerful person in the world, which Steve Jobs said.
The theme of our joint effort would be we will create happiness.
How do we manufacture that elusive intimate commodity?
At Disneyland, I wanted people to feel they were involved in something more than parking cars, serving food, or sweeping up popcorn.
He told a parable.
Two men are laying bricks.
somebody asked one of them what they are doing what he's doing and his response
Is I'm laying bricks.
To the same question.
The other man answers, I'm building a cathedral.
I don't wanna go through my life thinking I'm just laying bricks. I'd much rather go through life believing.
believing and only works if you truly believe it, then I'm building a th cathedral.
And part of that is really important that companies should have their own they should create their own language.
This idea of them creating their own language appears over and over again. I'm gonna read you two separate sections that are separated by like two hundred pages in the book.
says uh we don't this is part of the training. We don't have customers, we have guests. We're not employees, we're hosts and hostesses. We don't have crowds, we have an audience. Two hundred pages later they're talking about they're still continuing this
uh in modern day
with one of the head of PR at Disney. I was the last word on copy issues for publicity and marketing.
And my red pen eliminated the word ride whenever I found it. This is in two thousand eight.
When we only describe our attractions as rides, we fall into the category of six flags or universal studios.
We should rise above them.
And describe what we do as attractions, adventures, immersive experiences, and of course stories. When you are creating Disney magic.
The words to describe it should support the magical experiences. It's excellent.
Customers are to be called guests.
Those who sell the customers ice cream.
Are called hosts and hostesses.
Many of our labels are drawn from the theater.
Guests do not form a crowd, but they form an audience.
Ticket takers do not have jobs, but they have roles.
They were cast members and when they escape the audience for a break, they do so off stage, usually in a backstage area.
The park as a whole was the show.
Which the audience first entered through the outer lobby, which is the part which we call parking lot. They call the outer lobby.
Another thing that recurs over and over again, especially as they get closer to
They have a deadline. Like the park has to open. Really I think one of the biggest lessons I took from this book is like what if I had a you know a self imposed deadline? I know I I I I want to make a podcast every week, right?
But my entire life. Like I don't really have uh any other deadlines out of that, like
It's almost like deadlines force this sense of urgency that is very obvious when you read this book and something that's
I gotta figure out a w nother other ways to
add that to my life and work.
But what is fascinating is even as they're getting closer to the deadline, right? You know, it's very obvious that when they open, this park's gonna be, you know, I think around eighty percent actually complete.
But even though they knew they wasn't gonna be all the way complete.
Disney would not relax his standards of excellence and particularly
His
Obsession with detail, he said in the other book.
Last week.
The detail. If we lose the detail, we lose everything.
That was a quote from Walt Disney.
And really when I'm about to describe to you is like this is soul in the game.
He had soul in the game. These are the people that I want to buy products from. These are people I want to support.
Because detail is the most expensive of any other feature because what it costs. It costs time.
It's not just the materials, it's the time invested.
And so they wind up finishing
What are these gonna be these like uh c horse drawn uh like stagecoaches?
And so every single time one of his employees is like, let's just cut this corner, let's, you know, go the cheaper route, or let's go the faster route. You you have the same response from Walt Disney.
He says, Why don't we just leave the leather straps off, Walt?
The people are never going to appreciate all this close up detail anyways.
Disney treated him to a tart little lecture. You're being a poor communicator.
People are okay. Don't you ever forget that.
They will respond to it. They will appreciate it.
His employee didn't argue and he said, We put the best damn leather straps on that stagecoach you've ever seen.
And that's just a recurring thing and it's detailed that you can't even see up close.
If you look at the top of the castle.
In Disneyland it says, look at the top of the castle. At the base of the highest towers are a series of tremendously detailed gargoyles, which you can barely see from the ground.
And yet they are part of our magic formula. They are part of a thousand.
Little tiny details.
We are looking at right now, but don't consciously perceive individually they are nothing.
Collectively
They add up to a visual experience that the guests cannot find.
Anywhere else, multiple pages later.
In fact
There's a great
I this I sometimes I really love uh titles of chapters and this is one of the perfect uh um the title of this chapter that I've just fast forwarded to is a perfect explanation of what I'm trying to get across to. It's called The Perfectionist at Work.
And so we have another example of this, another example of Walt Disney not appreciating people trying to get him to cut corners.
Walt would not cut corners and spotted and and hated any attempt to do so. I wanted to put plastic railings up on the top of the houses of Main Street, said Wood.
And Walt wanted real wrought iron.
They're forty feet in the air. Nobody could tell the difference.
It's that relentless adherence to this principle. You know, that's what he said. He's like the thing that's going to make
Disneyland unique and different is the detail.
So if you lose the detail, you lose it all. It's like this beautifully simple.
And very powerful idea they had.
And one thing that's obvious that I just jotted down to myself.
It's like if
Walt Disney's looking at something.

He's thinking about ways to improve it.
And I need to make the point, like the th this attention to detail is not just superficial things.
Like attention to detail saved him multiple times.
And so at the time they're they they need a ton of they have to build their own river for God's sake.
And they're running out of time and money. And so Disney's engineers come to them and they're like, hey.
Uh we need a big
Very expensive pump.
That will deliver all the water that we need from the wells.
And Disney said no, just cut a flume to the river and turn the water on.
And the engineers like you can't do that. So they open up these maps and they explain that the water needed to flow uphill and it wouldn't do that.
Try it anyway, Disney insisted. So again, this is attention to detail saving him, not just for
cosmetic or even superficial reasons.
They did this and it worked. Disney had carefully gone over his acreage months earlier.
This is a form of attention to detail, right?
He had carefully gone over his acreage month months earlier when it was just orange trees. Orange trees.
He had talked with the farmers about irrigation.
And he'd seen how they manage it, he knew.
That the surveyor's maps were wrong.
That is a form of detail. Paying attention to detail saved him.
And so there's a bunch of people around Walt trying to get him to push back to like not adhere to the deadline and that just
The reason the deadline can't move
Is because
Th.
It had to come live.
On july seventeenth and not a day later.
because the partnership agreement that he had with ABC
was that the park's opening
would also be in conjunction with the most ambitious live television broadcast
yet ever attempted.
All of it was live. It was the largest collection of live television equipment.
they had spent one of the largest budgets like advertising
uh in newspapers all over the country.
No matter what happened, even if the park was fifty percent of the way down, it had to go live on July seventeenth.
So a few days
Before the park opens.
He it's his him and his wife's thirtieth wedding anniversary and they decide to have a party at Disneyland.
And this was just hilarious. It's one of my favorite stories'cause it really builds like
To to some degree, like when you study
Disney. Well Disney seems kinda like superhuman.
And this story kinda humanizes them. So
He does say something's fascinating at the very beginning now.
uh at the very beginning of Disneyland, he would refuse to allow them to sell any kind of alcohol.
And his reasoning for that w really speaks to the love that he had for the work that he was doing at this point in his year. In in his life, rather.
Says I feel when I go down to the park I don't need a drink.
I work around that place all day and I don't have one. After I come out of a heavy day at the studio, I want to drink to relax. So he talked about the difference, right? He was drinking a ton at the end of the night.
uh when he was you know in a m a much worse place.
But this one night
in Disneyland a few days before it opens, in celebration of his thirtieth.
uh wedding anniversary, there's a ton of alcohol.
And his daughter just tells a great story. Just brings a smile to my face.
Says he was loving every minute of it and just grinning at people.
Uh, later everyone was worried about dad driving home.
They were trying to steal his car keys and everything, and I just said, Daddy, can I drive you home? He said, Well, sure, honey.
He just climbed in the back seat of my car.
And he's smashed. He's

He's just absolutely smashed at this point.
He climbed in the back seat of my car.
He had a map of Disneyland and he rolled it up and tunted it in my ear as if it was a trumpet.
And before I knew it, all was silent.
There he was with his arms folded around the map.
Like a boy with a boy trumpet sound asleep.
And even though they have to open in two days from now, you know, there's just
There's a ton of stuff that's either broken or not finished.
Uh the landscaping budget had run out. So again, uh a form of resourcefulness.
Uh yeah, they had they started spraying dead grass with green paint so it looked like gr the grass was alive and healthy.
There's just a ton of things that are just not going to be done. Some of which they're trying to do up until the very last minute. They're literally working on the park.
R right before the the show goes live.
And really the main point behind all this is you said Disney was well aware of the shortcomings. And I think anybody that's you know been inside of a company, you just realize it's maybe not as drastically unfinished as what's happening to Disney, but there's just always things. This is like never get to the point where it's like, oh, everything's working, functioning.
Pro properly.
This is perfect. There's nothing else we need to improve. That just d that state of affairs never exists. And I think reading this
book and especially this chapter is just that that constant reminder.
And even a legend like Disney. Like he goes to bed the night before
uh their opening and he's just sure that he's gonna be at the center of the most public humiliation in show business history.
He had become so anxious leading up to that point, he told his wife and daughters to stay home because it's like, Oh, there's no point in coming, you're just gonna see a gigantic failure, I'm ruined.
He was having trouble sleeping, he just wasn't feeling good. But what's fascinating is the day that it came, the opening day
He put on a good front, even if he wasn't feeling good.
says the dark premonitions had lifted.
And now he seemed to be completely at ease and enjoying this huge moment.
And that huge moment is the opening, the the simulcast live broadcast of the Disneyland show and the opening of Disneyland Park.
This is h crazy. The United States
Contained a hundred and sixty nine million citizens on july seventeenth, nineteen fifty five, and ninety million of them.
Watch.
The show.
Fifty four point two percent of the population.
And so Disney's gonna host it. He's got a bunch of other people there, like Ronald Reagan, the future governor of California.
But what was fascinating is
Uh the guy his friend Art Link Linkletter, which one of the most famous talk show hosts.
uh that he took out to the when it was just orange grows and trying to tell him the story the guy's like I hate to tell my friend that he's just lost it.
But
He asked.
He's like
Hey, I need help. Like I need you know, a series of, you know, people that can add lib, good hosts.
But I don't have any money to pay you.
And
Uh link letter is like that's fine.
I will do it for the union minimum, which is like, you know, five hundred bucks. And Disney could not believe that his friend would
You know, it's like
hiring an A list actor for minimum wage.
But Link Letter was a very sophisticated
uh entrepreneur too.
And he's like, Listen, I will do it and it's and in lieu of payment of my normal rate.
Just give me the photo concession at Disneyland, the rights of the photo concession at Disneyland for the next 10 years. This is an interesting fact of history.
Forty years later, Link Letter wrote surprising, the net returns from this valuable concession are
Made me the highest paid broadcaster for one show in the history of television.
And interesting enough, because you never know when a friend of yours is offering you like the deal of a lifetime, he tried to convince friends of his like hey
buy up all the land that I'm now using on Disneyland, please build a hotel. I don't have the money for it. Please do this.
You're gonna be so rich.
And nobody did it. They just didn't believe in it. And so
Really, the you know, Disney is obviously obsessed with control. And now that you know, they could try to control that as much as possible if you've ever been to Disney World. They wanna own the hotels.
But they didn't have that option at this point. So this is you know, right around the opening of Disneyland.
And this is just a reminder that you have to do what you can where you are with what you have.
In Anaheim.
At the opening.
Uh of Disney, right? Before d or before Disney Open, rather.
They had
A total of eighty seven hotel rooms.
And so because they can't have the money to
Develop the hotel.
hotels themselves, they actually sign agreement with outsiders, which is very on Disney like at this point.
But
They just do the best deal possible. And so they do license agreement. You have the right to build a hotel associated with Disneyland.
It's gonna cost them a thousand dollars per month.
Plus you have to pay two percent of the gross revenue to Walt Disney.
Plus twenty five thousand dollars a year to use the word Disneyland.
But this is him just doing what he can where he is with what he has. This was unusual. Disney always kept a tight hold on his name, but the fact that he would allow access to it reflects how much he wanted his park served by a good hotel that was currently beyond his means.
And so as you can imagine, the the day of the opening, a ton goes wrong.
the the the show goes off really well.
But considering how fast I did this in one year and one day.
You know, it says uh that Disney knew better than anybody else that the park can open less than eighty percent finish.
And that there was a lot of hard work ahead.
But the hard work did not frighten him'cause hard work never had frightened him.
And so there's a lot more detail in the book, but I'll just give you a an example of some of the stuff.
that went wrong. They ran out of food and water.
Uh, there were not enough bathrooms, so people had to pee in the bushes.
the boat got stranded, it ran off the track, so the guests had to swim to shore.
The asphalt was still soft because it was so hot and they just poured it.
That women's high heels were getting stuck in there.
There was record high temperatures of over a hundred degrees.
There was a gas leak that closed down part of the park and luckily didn't it cause an explosion.
The car ride where like little kids drive cars, which at this time are called autotopia.
Led there was several car crashes, and one kid lost all of his teeth in his mouth.
Walt had to resupply the bathrooms himself with toilet paper.
So he's carrying loads of toilet paper to the bathrooms.
And
They caused the worst traffic jam in Orange County history.
But
Here's the most important part. It was total confusion, both on camera and behind the scenes, but it was a celebration of the birth.
Of a dream.
We had a park.
It was a start.
And then there was a fascinating contrast I still think takes place today where
The media
The actual
newspaper writers and everybody else they're like
Walt Stream was a nightmare.
This is a seventeen million dollar piece of crap.
It is a people trap.
I can't believe how bad this is.
And yet the true believers that I should go
And then they write these reviews. And again, I think this is what was helpful where
you had eight months of Walt describing like
This is my
dream, this is the goal, this is what I'm working towards. They understand that hey
The
the the way that Disneyland was on day one is not how it's going to be. It's gonna be constantly this evolving, living, breathing thing.
A note I left myself earlier in the book, which I don't know if I read to you was that Disneyland, his goal for Disneyland was an outdoor living, breathing, constantly evolving story.
A movie that he could update and improve upon for the rest of his life.
And so the initial like
negative
Headlines from the press.
they start to abate as you have more of the people that are buying into his dream in the story and they're fans of his work.
and trust that he's gonna deliver on what he promised he would.
And one excerpt from this review is here we first noted
The thing which impressed us ever more deeply as the day went on, the care and the quality of materials
Which had gone into everything. Disneyland is not shoddy.
It is not a carnival.
It is not false fronts and makeshift rears. It is carefully built by experienced workmen.
Details are not forgotten.
and materials are of the highest obtainable quality.
And some of the criticism that he got from the media was accurate. He he even said like there's gonna be changes made.
Year in and year out.
Forever.
in a project, in a business, in this idea that hey
We can make changes year in and year out forever is exactly
Why he built Disneyland.
Disney was determined to keep it growing by what he called plussing.
his term for improving what was already there and making constant additions.
Disney said. It has been said that Disneyland will never be complete.
In fact, I said it.
The way I see it, Disneyland will never be finished.
It's something we can keep developing and adding to.
A motion picture is different.
Once it's wrapped up and sent out for processing, we're through with it.
If there are things that could be improved, we can't do anything about it anymore.
I've always wanted to work on something alive.
Something that keeps growing.
And now we've got that.
In Disneyland.
And that is where I'll leave it. For the full story, highly recommend reading the book. It is a quick read, gives you a brief overview of his life and then goes into great detail about how he built Disneyland.
If you buy the book using the link, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. Another way to support the podcast, if you want, is to buy Founders Merch. That is available at founderspodcast.com. That is three hundred.
And forty seven books down.
One thousand ago.
And I'll talk to you again soon.
When you read about or you listen to
the this history of
Disneyland the creation of Disneyland, this ever evolving idea. What it becomes obvious.
is that this idea in many ways was pulled out of Walt Disney.
And this just happened to my friend Ben. My friend Ben is the founder of Vesto. So I'm building this trusted partner network.
And so anybody, any company that advertises
on founders. One, I have to know the founder. I have to build a relationship with them. Relationships run the world. That is a main theme from the history of entrepreneurship. It's really important to build relationships with other founders. And because these trusted partners are able to gain exposure to an incredibly high value and intelligent
community of founders. In return, I ask them to give you the best possible deal. That is very straightforward, very easy to understand. What I did not understand going into this
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way before I talked about Vesto, that's the I I people say I slore my words, so
It's Vesto. V is in Victor, E is an egg, S is in Senra, T is in Tom, O is an Oprah.
Dot com.
Vesto, I'll try to say it clearly.
Well before I ever talked about on the podcast, I got to know Ben every time he comes through Miami
Uh, we either have dinner together or we go for long walks. We have a bunch of mutual founder friends. And the reason I found out about his company is because I had two separate founder friends.
on two opposite ends of the the founder spectrum, if you will. One was uh bootstrapped
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And so that is the feature I discussed on previous podcasts. But what was fascinating is one, if you go to Vesta.com,
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The first one in that trusted partner network is Vesta. So go to Vesta.com, tell them David from Founder sent you and you get five hundred dollars off.
Thank you very much for listening. Thank you very much for the support and I'll talk to you again soon.